The Other Side of the Wind | Telescope Film
The Other Side of the Wind

The Other Side of the Wind

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Orson Welles's last feature film, left mostly unedited at the time of his passing, comments on the director's own position in the film industry. A faux documentary following a grizzled director as he returns from years abroad in Europe to a changed Hollywood, where he attempts to make his innovative comeback film.

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What are critics saying?

100

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.

100

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Its relentless, almost hallucinogenic craziness makes it a hard film to engage with, and the viewer drop-off rate when it launches on Netflix later this year will undoubtedly be steep. But as a mad satire of movie-world tumult, and a furious love letter to the business that made and unmade its maker, it could scarcely be improved.

100

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

The Other Side of the Wind is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time.

100

Slate by Sam Adams

The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.

100

Film Journal International by Daniel Eagan

Even middling Welles is better than none, and it's a treat to see his longtime collaborators like Paul Stewart and Mercedes McCambridge performing as brilliantly as ever. John Huston is a special delight.

91

The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi

The Other Side of the Wind is not a comeback picture in the sense Touch of Evil was supposed to be. It is a confounding, unsettling, disorienting adieu from a director whose nonconformist and uncompromising vision was decades ahead of his time.

91

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The Other Side Of The Wind is ultimately about an artist’s fear of seeing a reflection of his own sublimated desires — the way that art hides as much as it reveals about its maker. We’ll be debating it, defending it, reappraising it for a long time to come.

91

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

As it turns out, bearing Welles’s words in mind, it becomes almost a meta version of Welles’s movie. I would like to think that the great magician himself would have approved.

90

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

Don't dig too deep into The Other Side of the Wind: It's largely surface. But what a surface. And what a chest of toys for a man who never lost his childlike delight in playing with the medium.

88

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.

84

TheWrap by Robert Abele

In its barbs and visuals, indie vibe and old-school ambition, inside jabs and outsider artistry, it feels both of its time — when Welles’ cachet straddled an old guard who shunned him and young rebels who worshipped him — and like an acidly spit anecdote about artistic humiliation that still feels relevant.

83

The Playlist by Gregory Ellwood

It is almost impossible, however, to watch Other Side Of The Wind without taking its history into account. That makes the final product uniquely captivating.

80

CineVue by John Bleasdale

It is remarkably good.

80

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.

80

Screen International by Jonathan Romney

It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

Wellesians will vigorously debate the aesthetic results of this torturously achieved accomplishment but, to the credit of those who, against daunting odds and nearly a half-century's worth of obstacles, arduously pushed this project to completion, the end result feels like a plausible fulfillment of the style Welles himself established for it.

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium.

75

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Fans of the director’s late-period work (particularly his last completed effort, the rapid-fire diary film “F for Fake”) will find it thrilling to return to those unpredictable, garrulous recesses, no matter the bumpy ride. Welles continues to contemplate storytelling, Hollywood, and his own troubled career by transforming these obsessions into a marathon of creativity.